Joan Robinson’s Views on Development Economics as Political Economy

Abstract

Joan Robinson’s writing on issues of underdevelopment and development is often divided into categories. There is her writing on the underdeveloped economies struggling against poverty and towards capitalist industrialisation; there is her writing on those with the same aims but within the context of socialist industrialisation; and there is her writing on China, which too, can be divided into various stages of her critical awareness of the information she was given and the various stages in China’s political and economic development. Her writing could also be divided between that which emphasised information gathering, her selection and documentation of the relevant ‘facts’ of the situation and, informed by these, her theoretical interpretation and policies. For example, she claimed that her China visits were to learn rather than to advise or teach, and much of her writing on China is descriptive; but it is also necessarily interpretative.